Plant tissue culture techniques are the most frequently used biotechnological tools for basic and applied purposes ranging from investigation on plant developmental processes, functional gene studies, commercial plant micropropagation, generation of transgenic plants with specific industrial and agronomical traits, plant breeding and crop improvement, virus elimination from infected materials to render high-quality healthy plant material, preservation and conservation of germplasm of vegetative propagated plant crops, and rescue of threatened or endangered plant species. Additionally, plant cell and organ cultures are of interest for the production of secondary metabolites of industrial and pharmaceutical interest. New technologies, such as the genome editing ones combined with tissue culture and Agrobacterium tumefaciens infection, are currently promising alternatives for the highly specific genetic manipulation of interesting agronomical or industrial traits in crop plants. Application of omics (genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics) to plant tissue culture will certainly help to unravel complex developmental processes such as organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis, which will probably enable to improve the efficiency of regeneration protocols for recalcitrant species. Additionally, metabolomics applied to tissue culture will facilitate the extraction and characterization of complex mixtures of natural plant products of industrial interest. General and specific aspects and applications of plant tissue culture and the advances and perspectives are described in this edition.
Keywords: Aseptic culture; Genetic modified organisms; Large-scale propagation; Metabolic engineering; Plant cell culture; Proteomics; Transcriptomics.